Adin ballou biography of william

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Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. At its height in the early s there were about members. The experiment came to an end in when the Draper brothers, who held a majority of the stock, withdrew their shares and invested in a factory. Hopedale became a mill village.

In its year history, Hopedale outlasted them all and was neither the most interracial nor the most antireligious and antigovernmental, nor the most industrial. Rather, the longest-lasting community was apparently the one that was moderately interracial, moderately industrial, the most willing to permit wage differentials, the most clearly religious, and the most clearly non-resistant.

He served as pastor of the Hopedale parish, which in was admitted to the Worcester Conference of Unitarian churches. He wrote a detailed history of the Hopedale community, an autobiography, a volume on Practical Christian Socialismthree volumes on Primitive Christianitya history of Milford, a history of the Ballous in America, and an examination of spirit manifestations.

Christian Non-Resistance InAdin Ballou published his most acclaimed work, Christian Non-Resistance in all its important bearings, illustrated and defendeda book of pages in seven chapters, printed in Philadelphia and soon reprinted in England. Although was the year of the Mexican War, Ballou cites neither this nor any other reason for attempting his most comprehensive defense of the non-resistance philosophy at this time, except that it was requested and financed by Edmund M.

Davis, the son-in-law of Lucretia Mott. The author believes it to be as ancient as Christianity and as true as the New Testament. It is soberly and frankly addressed to the reason, conscience and higher sentiments of mankind - not to their propensities and lower passions. It is a book for the futurerather than the presentand will be better appreciated by the public half a century hence than now.

But a better future is even now dawning, and it is needed to help develope the coming age of love and peace. A great transition of the human mind has commenced, and the reign of military and penal violence must ultimately give place to that of forbearance, tolerance, and mercy. Chapter I defines his terms and describes the idea. Chapter II examines the Scriptural passages which authorize the idea.

The key passage is of course from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, "resist not evil. These three chapters are the core of his position. It may be noted that Ballou took a conservative position in basing non-resistance on scripture.

Adin ballou biography of william: Autobiography of Adin Ballou,

His friend Garrison had already repudiated the necessity for a Biblical foundation, and had declared the Bible practically irrelevant. Ballou had to argue that the wars approved by God in the Old Testament were teachings that had been superseded by the gospel, but Garrison could view the Hebrew patriarchs as warmongers, for God could never have authorized the extermination even of enemies.

When pressed for a more adequate definition, Ballou declares that Christian non-resistance signifies adhering to the example of Christ in expressing the love of God by total abstinence from all resistance of injury with injury, or the refusal to resist evil with evil. By relying on moral force and non-injurious physical force he expects to overcome evil with good.

This resistance may occur in two forms: moral resistance, such as example and persuasion, and also what he calls "non-injurious, benevolent physical resistance. The full doctrine of Christ, as Ballou understood it, was "Resist not personal injury with personal injury," and he describes it this way: It contemplates men as actually injured, or in imminent danger of being injured by their fellow men, and commands them to abstain from all personal injuries, either as a means of retribution, self defence, or suppression of injury.

They must not render evil for evil, or railing for railing, or hatred for hatred. But they are not prohibited from resisting, opposing, preventing, or counteracting the injuries inflicted, attempted or threatened by man on man, in the use of any absolutely uninjurious forces, whether moral or physical. On the contrary, it is their bounden duty, by all such benevolent resistances, to promote the safety and welfare, the holiness and happiness of all human beings, as opportunity may offer.

His concept of revelation was that the divine message is in the principle beneath the words. The words are human; the principles divine. He once published a pamphlet entitled "The Bible: In its fundamental principles absolutely Divine. In its explicative ideas and language properly Human. God is love, and Christ is the great example. This leads him to a sub-principle which is "the essential efficacy of goodas the counteracting force with which to resist evil," and he declares, "Faith, then, in the inherent superiority of good over eviltruth over error, right over wrong, love over hatred, is the immediate moral basis of our doctrine.

On the one hand, non-resistance is commanded by the gospel regardless of the consequences, while on the other hand it is commended as the most efficacious strategy. One leads to obedient martyrdom; the other to success. For Ballou the moral commandment remained in first place, but he also offered support for the belief that it will produce better results.

Others would be more tempted to sacrifice non-resistance for the greater goal of abolishing slavery. He specifies some of the forms they must take in the life of the Christian non-resistant. He cannot kill, maim, or injure another human. He cannot participate in any lawless conspiracy or mob which intends any such injury.

Adin ballou biography of william: Autobiography of Adin Ballou Containing

He cannot be a member of any lawful association which supports or approves war, capital punishment, or any other personal injury. He cannot be an officer or private or chaplain in any army, navy or militia. He cannot be an officer, elector, agent, or approver of any government whose constitution and laws require, authorize, or tolerate war, slavery, capital punishment or the infliction of any absolute injury.

He writes, The man who swears, affirms, or otherwise pledges himself, to support such a compact. The army is his army, the navy his navy, the militia his militia, the gallows his gallows, the pillory his pillory, the whipping post his whipping post, the branding iron his branding iron, the prison his prison, the dungeon his dungeon, and the slaveholding his slaveholding.

When the constitutional majority declare war, it is his war. All the slaughter, rapine, ravages, robbery, destruction and mischief committed under that declaration, in accordance with the laws of war, are his. Nor can he exculpate himself by pleading that he was one of a strenuous anti-war minority in the government. He was in the government.

He had sworn, affirmed, and otherwise pledged himself, that the majority should have discretionary power to declare war. He tied up his hands with that anti-Christian obligation, to stand by the majority in all the crimes and abominations inseparable from war. It is therefore his war, its murders are his murders, its horrible injuries on humanity are his injuries.

They are all committed with his solemn sanction. There is no escape from this terrible moral responsibility but by a conscientious withdrawal from such government, and an uncompromising protest against so much of its fundamental creed and constitutional law, as is decidedly anti-Christian. He must cease to be its pledged supporter, and approving dependent.

Chapter IV opens a second line of argument based on natural philosophy, in which he argues that the law of self- preservation is better served by non-resistant principles than by force and violence. According to Peter Brock, the eminent historian of peace movements, this is the first known attempt to base an absolute pacifism on naturalistic rather than religious grounds.

In all, Ballou provides forty examples and illustrations of non-resistance in action. The final chapter examines the stance of the non-resistant person toward governments which authorize or tolerate forms of violence such as war, capital punishment, slavery, or penal injury. It suffers, like so many of the writings of his contemporaries, from sentimentality and excessive optimism.

Basically his concern lay with proving the religious case for pacifism. He relied upon the conversion of individuals, and their influence of their example upon others, or at most the creation of fraternal communities which could show a better way. In the life of the Hopedale community he sought to avoid all violence and domination.

Corporal punishment was excluded from the educational program, for example. A census of persons openly supporting non-resistant abolitionism would show a peak about and then a decline in the forties and fifties as a series of shocks moved the nation into war, with slavery a precipitating cause. When Texas was admitted as a slave state inthe Massachusetts Antislavery Society circulated a adin ballou biography of william to refuse participation in any war to perpetuate or end slavery.

May declared, "If there must be fighting, which I do not desire, I hope the United States arms will be defeated. In Concord, Henry Thoreau, who for six years had refused to pay his poll tax, spent his night in jail inand the resulting essay on civil disobedience has a number of references to the war such as, "When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

In the Civil War they would clash. May, outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act, found justification for force in rescuing of escaped slaves from bounty hunters. The violent struggle for dominance between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas converted some to the view that those who did not believe in non-resistance ought to arm themselves, and it converted a few non-resistants to outright militarism.

Henry Thoreau, for example, who had refused a tax during the Mexican War, saw John Brown as a man with an authority superior to the law. Many of the leading Christian non-resistants moved away from the positions they took in Lewis Perry suggests this was inevitable due to a fault in their position. Though they were "immediatists" in their whole-hearted commitment to social change, their adhesion to non-resistance and refusal to employ governmental force meant that abolition could only come about gradually through individual conversions of slaveholders.

Immediate commitment to revolutionary ideas thus implied gradualism in achieving major goals such as abolition.

Adin ballou biography of william: Adin Ballou (April 23, –

As they became more concerned with the slave and his condition, the attachment to non-resistant means would decline. Ballou, however, had explicitly accepted the necessity of gradualism in reform when he created his community, and was able to hold together both sides of the equation. The signatories announced their withdrawal from "the governments of the world.

While they did not acknowledge the earthly rule of man, they also did not rebel or "resist any of their ordinances by physical force. We cannot render evil for evil Ballou was a prominent local historian for Milford and wrote one of the earliest complete histories of the town in"History of the town of Milford, Worcester county, Massachusetts, from its first settlement to ".

The park also contains a small weathered front doorstep and a boot-scraper, the only surviving remains of the original farmhouse the first Hopedale Settlers built. Ballou's writings drew the admiration of Leo Tolstoy[ 10 ] who frequently cited Ballou as a major influence on his theological and political ideology in his nonfiction texts like The Kingdom of God is Within You, along with sponsoring Russian translations of some of Ballou's works.

Ballou's Christian anarchist and nonresistance ideals in texts like Practical Christianity were passed down from Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhicontributing not only to the nonviolent resistance movement in the Russian Revolution led by the Tolstoyans but also Gandhi's early thinkings on the nonviolent theory of praxis and the development of his first ashramthe Tolstoy Farm.

In a recent publication, the American philosopher and anarchist Crispin Sartwell wrote that the works by Ballou and his other Christian anarchist contemporaries like William Lloyd Garrison directly influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

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